How to modify your game on the fly using Game Overrides

Deliver personalized game environments to your players at scale, in real time, with no code changes. 

If you’re running a live game, you know the challenges of keeping your player base engaged and happy. Launching new content and features on a regular basis is a must to keep your game afloat, reduce player churn and keep loyal fans around for a long time. 

What if you could make changes to your game at scale and measure the impact without any major code changes or app updates? 

With Unity’s Game Overrides (powered by Remote Config), you can change or update any config variable available to you within your game to make any improvements you want. Game Overrides can change your game’s difficulty, ad frequency, or general attributes for any set of players that you define.

Here are a few things you can do with Game Overrides:

• Roll out new mechanics and features to your players
• Run a seasonal event for your players, or different events for different audiences
• Fine-tune and balance your game’s economy
• Test out a change to your level design
• Optimize your in-game ad strategy
• Run A/B tests to determine which content resonates the most with your players

A/B testing is a feature within Game Overrides that splits your override into variants so that you can see its impact on your game. 

For example, you might believe that players are given too many coins at the start of your game and are therefore progressing through your game too quickly. This means they may miss out on in-app purchase opportunities, or specific types of content you’d want them to unlock. With an A/B test, you can experiment with different amounts of coins to start with, and judge which set performs best.

Game Overrides works with other Unity Gaming Services:

• You can set up Game Overrides with data from Unity Analytics in order to target a specific Audience. This allows you to target players based on characteristics like country, platform and engagement.
• By pairing with Cloud Content Delivery, you can use badges to identify the content intended for a subset of players, and then test that content without affecting the live player base. 
• With Economy, you can create overrides to test out different levels of resources in your game like currencies, inventory items, and virtual purchases.

If you want to take a look at how Game Overrides works in a real game setting, you can check out some of the Unity Gaming Services Use Cases sample projects that incorporate them, including a sample that shows how to A/B test game difficulty, as well as a battle pass sample that includes seasonal rewards for players.

Game Overrides is free to use and available now. Visit the Unity Dashboard and check out the Documentation page to set up the tool. If you have any questions, make sure to join our forum.